Texans-Ravens game sets TV audience record

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I took advantage of the MLK holiday Monday, avoided the computer and cleaned out part of the garage. Then I signed on to find a complaint that I was too slow in posting ratings from the NFL divisional games.

I like that. Sorry for the delay. Here are the numbers.

As expected, the Texans-Ravens game set another standard for the most-watched Texans game since the franchise debut in 2002 against the Cowboys. The game earned a 37.0 Nielsen rating on KHOU (Channel 11) with a 67 share, meaning it was viewed by an average audience of 808,546 households in the Houston designated market area. I won’t have total viewers until later in the week, but I presume it will top 1.3 million.

Other local ratings: 23.3/48 in Dallas-Fort Worth, 22.6/48 in Austin, 22.1/44 in San Antonio and 43.4/72 in Baltimore.

In all, the four divisional games drew an average audience of 36.6 million viewers, up from 36.1 million last year. However, three of the four were below the average, and so we can deduce that No. 1 must have been a real blockbuster.

And it was. The Giants-Packers game on Fox had an average audience of 45.1 million viewers, the most ever for a divisional game. The 25.3/42 preliminary national rating was the highest since a 1997 Cowboys-Panthers game on Fox rated 27.6/49.